As a purchaser of the OpenBSD CD-ROM you already have several popular
``packages'', the ``ports'' collection, and some of the ``ports''
source file releases.
Installing applications from the CD-ROM package collection:
The OpenBSD CD-ROM ships with several applications pre-built
for various hardware architectures. The number of applications
vary according to available disk space. Check the directory
5.5/packages/ to see which packages are available for
your hardware architecture.
To install one or more of these packages you must
1) become the superuser (root)
2) mount the appropriate CD-ROM
3) use the ``pkg_add'' command to install the software
Example (in which we use su(1) to get superuser privileges, thus
you have to be in group "wheel", see the manual page for su(1)).
$ su
Password:
# mkdir -p /cdrom
# mount /dev/cd0a /cdrom
# cd /cdrom/5.5/packages/
# pkg_add ...
#
# umount /cdrom
Your hardware architecture can be determined by issuing
the command ``arch''. The response will be something like
``OpenBSD.sparc''. ``sparc'' is the architecture.
Package names are usually the application name and version
with .tgz appended, e.g. emacs-21.4p27.tgz
Installing applications from the ftp.openbsd.org package collection:
All packages have been placed on ftp.openbsd.org in the directory
pub/OpenBSD/5.5/packages// where is the supported
hardware architecture. You may want to peruse the directory for
your architecture to see what packages are available.
A per-architecture listing is also available on the webpage, see
http://www.openbsd.org/5.5_packages/
The full set of packages is on all of the OpenBSD FTP
mirror sites. See
http://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html
for a list of current ftp mirror sites.
For each architecture, a "pkglocatedb" file is also included,
which is a locate(1) database indexing the contents of all
packages found in the FTP directory. This can help you
identify which package contains a program you are looking
for, for example:
$ locate -d /cdrom/5.5/packages//pkglocatedb plaympeg
smpeg-0.4.4p12:/usr/local/bin/plaympeg
smpeg-0.4.4p12:/usr/local/man/man1/plaympeg.1
Installation of a package is very easy.
1) become the superuser (root)
2) use the ``pkg_add'' command to install the software
``pkg_add'' is smart enough to know how to download the software
from the OpenBSD ftp server. Example:
$ su
Password:
# pkg_add ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/5.5/packages//emacs-21.4p27.tgz
Installing applications from the OpenBSD ports collection:
See http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html for current instructions
on obtaining and installing OpenBSD ports.
Installing other applications:
If an OpenBSD package or port does not exist for an application
you're pretty much on your own. The first thing to do is ask
ports@openbsd.org if anyone is working on a port -- there may
be one in progress. If you don't have any luck there, you may
be able to adapt one from the FreeBSD ports or NetBSD package
collection.
If you can't find an existing port try to make your own and
feed it back to OpenBSD. That's how our ports collection grows.
Some details can be found at http://www.openbsd.org/porting.html
with more help coming from the mailing list, ports@openbsd.org.